7 ms·

Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support

86 points by felixbraun 5y ago

troymc 5y ago
The use of the word "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" in this article is irritating because in the context of tech, "crypto" can also mean "cryptography" and I'm pretty sure Stripe already has lots of cryptography specialists on staff. Or maybe Stripe is hiring a team of cryptozoologists?
- bdcravens 5y ago
  The article is discussing the Stripe job offers, which explicitly use the full term "cryptocurrency" at the beginning https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/staff-engineer-crypto/3495406 https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/staff-engineer-crypto/349540...
- lostmsu 5y ago
  In the context of an article titled "... Bitcoin" the meaning is clear.
- rvz 5y ago
  I hope you have read at least beyond the headline, as it clearly mentions the word 'Bitcoin' which from there, the context of what 'crypto' means is clear from the start: > Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support Nothing 'irritating' about that.
  - troymc 5y ago
    It might not be irritating to you but it is irritating to me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dgs_sgd 5y ago
If you're in the payments business in 2021 and don't have crypto product offerings then you are limiting your customer base. Imo a good decision for stripe, and even better to let others chart the course for a few years first.
- alonder 5y ago
  Is it really that limiting though? I know lots of people in and out of tech who have heard the word bitcoin or cryptocurrency and at most 2 people who have ever made or been interested in making a transaction. Obviously anecdata, but it doesnt seem to me like the amount of engineering effort vs actual users doesnt seem like an actually good tradeoff to me.
- sp332 5y ago
  It also limits their exposure to scams and customers trying to do chargebacks using non-reversible payment methods.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
    That's not a plus for the consumer and won't do much to enhance customer adoption and preference for the payment method.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  This is of course because in 2021 an overwhelming number of consumers are finally pushing for crypto currency payments.... /s Seriously though, if speculative assets are your thing then crypto is great. It's still not great for the average consumer to use for payments.
  - practice9 5y ago
    There is hope that the move to Proof Of Stake and the arrival of various scaling solutions for Ethereum will finally make crypto payments simpler (2022 - 2023 implementation time frame). Here is a short blog post that discusses this tech: https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-electronic-cash-system-dream-comes-to-life-8724a64e33f7 https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-elec... I think the other big issue is that current wallet apps are very buggy and their UX sucks in general, so your point still stands
new_guy 5y ago
I had a stripe account terminated for violating their terms (spoiler alert, I hadn't) but any crypto offering by them will be subject to the same terms. It's absolutely toxic that companies like this think they can move into the crypto space, it was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this.
- tyre 5y ago
  wait so your alternative is blocking some people from using crypto when it was set up explicitly to get away from people being allowed to arbitrarily block users?
- bdcravens 5y ago
  An advantage of crypto is that you can accept it directly. If you choose a centralized option, you're intentionally moving away from what you're suggesting the crypto space was set up for. As for "companies like this", pretty much every company in the crypto space has terms and conditions. There's no reason why a "crypto native" company will have a more generous interpretation than a company like Stripe. https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/other/does-coinbase-freeze-accounts https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/other/doe... https://www.gemini.com/legal/user-agreement#section-account-suspension https://www.gemini.com/legal/user-agreement#section-account-...
- WhisperingShiba 5y ago
  Fortunately, blockchain is permission less and this move will mainly help to introduce companies processing payments with Stripe to the reality of crypto payments. I expect that most power users and big players will opt for a Stripe-free crypto payment method.
- edwinwee 5y ago
  I work at Stripe—could you email at me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into what happened?
- tootie 5y ago
  "[crypto] was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this." I think that's a misleading statement since there are dozens of different currencies out there with different objectives. The original premise of Bitcoin as an alternative decentralized currency has been an abject failure since it has since morphed into an investment asset with no measurable fundamentals. Others exist to make currency transfers easier and they do that pretty well. Some likely exist as money laundering. Doge exists as a joke that got out of hand.
chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
The cryptocurrency space looks a lot different than it did 3 years ago... I hope they focus on supporting stablecoins. All the benefits of cryptocurrency (censorship resistance, etc) without having to hold on to a volatile asset.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thefounder 5y ago
  I hope that too but for stable coins to work you need atm machines and multiple exchanges otherwise you end-up with another paypal thing.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  They should issue their own stable coin. There is too much fraud with Tether to support it and another reputable stable coin in the industry will only help things.
- gh55 5y ago
  I don't assume intent but this comment is disinformation - stable coins are some of the riskiest major assets in the space, since their backing is questionable at best[1], and even those that are "backed" are inescapably custodial with all that entails (lack of censorship resistance being one unavoidable property so long as coins retain any sign of fungibility). I hope they "concentrate on" Bitcoin - which under close examination seems the first time hard money has ever been created. 1. AAVE Risks per Asset https://docs.aave.com/risk/asset-risk/risks-per-asset https://docs.aave.com/risk/asset-risk/risks-per-asset
  - chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
    Stablecoins are indeed immature. But volatile assets don't make for good money. Have you heard of Gresham's Law? "Bad money drives out the good"- that is, people will hoard the lucrative asset (bitcoin) and actually use the boring one (stablecoins).
  - 3np 5y ago
muhammadusman 5y ago
They should've stuck with Stellar, for any realistic money transferring between people (merchants, p2p, cross-border), Stellar is one of the best options as the fees are insanely low compared to any other large cryptocurrencies.
- boramalper 5y ago
  "The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar received $3 million in seed funding from Stripe.[6][7]"[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_(payment_network)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_(payment_network)#Hist... [0][6] http://fortune.com/2014/07/31/stripe-launches-bitcoin-challenger-gives-it-away-for-free/ http://fortune.com/2014/07/31/stripe-launches-bitcoin-challe... [0][7] http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-on-bitcoin-with-rival-digital-currency-stellar-1.1887360 http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-o...
lmeyerov 5y ago
I've been seeing two sides of this: - Our own payments: Some remote contractors ask to be paid in crypto: haven't figured out clean way how wrt rest of our back-office SaaS stack, so not yet. To a much more negligible extent, our online customers want to pay that way: we do get a lot of proton etc. email users, so I can imagine more of this in the future, esp. as we add more privacy features. I bet other startups are seeing the same! - Our power users: Crypto product & investigation teams often want to embed/use our GPU graph viz tech, and our inquiries have grown up from early VC/ICO-dependent startups to ones with $B+ assets under management. At this rate, seems like only a matter of 1-2 years for banks and big consulting co's for the same thing. So a big yet modern payment processor like Stripe seems quite sensible right now! (And I think Square was trying on and off for awhile as well.)
NicoJuicy 5y ago
It's just FOMO, i think, since PayPal did something similar. No doubt they had an analysis about it. But the potential cost of being wrong is much bigger than financing 5 employees.
- baby 5y ago
  I don't think it is. It's just about accepting other means of payments, which is Stripe's business. I'm more interested in what a company like Wise would do with stablecoins.
  - NicoJuicy 5y ago
    It's all about how many transactions there are. I don't think there are enough, just like in the past
    - baby 5y ago
      It’s up to stripe to decide if there is enough transaction now to make it worth it, or if they want to be one of the first to support the market.

86 points by felixbraun 5y ago

The use of the word "crypto" to mean "cryptocurrency" in this article is irritating because in the context of tech, "crypto" can also mean "cryptography" and I'm pretty sure Stripe already has lots of cryptography specialists on staff. Or maybe Stripe is hiring a team of cryptozoologists?

bdcravens 5y ago
The article is discussing the Stripe job offers, which explicitly use the full term "cryptocurrency" at the beginning https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/staff-engineer-crypto/3495406 https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/staff-engineer-crypto/349540...
lostmsu 5y ago
In the context of an article titled "... Bitcoin" the meaning is clear.
rvz 5y ago
I hope you have read at least beyond the headline, as it clearly mentions the word 'Bitcoin' which from there, the context of what 'crypto' means is clear from the start: > Stripe Is Hiring a Crypto Team 3 Years After Ending Bitcoin Support Nothing 'irritating' about that.
- troymc 5y ago
  It might not be irritating to you but it is irritating to me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dgs_sgd 5y ago

If you're in the payments business in 2021 and don't have crypto product offerings then you are limiting your customer base. Imo a good decision for stripe, and even better to let others chart the course for a few years first.

alonder 5y ago
Is it really that limiting though? I know lots of people in and out of tech who have heard the word bitcoin or cryptocurrency and at most 2 people who have ever made or been interested in making a transaction. Obviously anecdata, but it doesnt seem to me like the amount of engineering effort vs actual users doesnt seem like an actually good tradeoff to me.
sp332 5y ago
It also limits their exposure to scams and customers trying to do chargebacks using non-reversible payment methods.
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
  That's not a plus for the consumer and won't do much to enhance customer adoption and preference for the payment method.
johnebgd 5y ago
This is of course because in 2021 an overwhelming number of consumers are finally pushing for crypto currency payments.... /s Seriously though, if speculative assets are your thing then crypto is great. It's still not great for the average consumer to use for payments.
- practice9 5y ago
  There is hope that the move to Proof Of Stake and the arrival of various scaling solutions for Ethereum will finally make crypto payments simpler (2022 - 2023 implementation time frame). Here is a short blog post that discusses this tech: https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-electronic-cash-system-dream-comes-to-life-8724a64e33f7 https://polynya.medium.com/argent-zksync-a-peer-to-peer-elec... I think the other big issue is that current wallet apps are very buggy and their UX sucks in general, so your point still stands

new_guy 5y ago

I had a stripe account terminated for violating their terms (spoiler alert, I hadn't) but any crypto offering by them will be subject to the same terms. It's absolutely toxic that companies like this think they can move into the crypto space, it was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this.

tyre 5y ago
wait so your alternative is blocking some people from using crypto when it was set up explicitly to get away from people being allowed to arbitrarily block users?
bdcravens 5y ago
An advantage of crypto is that you can accept it directly. If you choose a centralized option, you're intentionally moving away from what you're suggesting the crypto space was set up for. As for "companies like this", pretty much every company in the crypto space has terms and conditions. There's no reason why a "crypto native" company will have a more generous interpretation than a company like Stripe. https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/other/does-coinbase-freeze-accounts https://help.coinbase.com/en/coinbase/other-topics/other/doe... https://www.gemini.com/legal/user-agreement#section-account-suspension https://www.gemini.com/legal/user-agreement#section-account-...
WhisperingShiba 5y ago
Fortunately, blockchain is permission less and this move will mainly help to introduce companies processing payments with Stripe to the reality of crypto payments. I expect that most power users and big players will opt for a Stripe-free crypto payment method.
edwinwee 5y ago
I work at Stripe—could you email at me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into what happened?
tootie 5y ago
"[crypto] was set up explicitly to get away from companies like this." I think that's a misleading statement since there are dozens of different currencies out there with different objectives. The original premise of Bitcoin as an alternative decentralized currency has been an abject failure since it has since morphed into an investment asset with no measurable fundamentals. Others exist to make currency transfers easier and they do that pretty well. Some likely exist as money laundering. Doge exists as a joke that got out of hand.

chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago

The cryptocurrency space looks a lot different than it did 3 years ago... I hope they focus on supporting stablecoins. All the benefits of cryptocurrency (censorship resistance, etc) without having to hold on to a volatile asset.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
thefounder 5y ago
I hope that too but for stable coins to work you need atm machines and multiple exchanges otherwise you end-up with another paypal thing.
johnebgd 5y ago
They should issue their own stable coin. There is too much fraud with Tether to support it and another reputable stable coin in the industry will only help things.
gh55 5y ago
I don't assume intent but this comment is disinformation - stable coins are some of the riskiest major assets in the space, since their backing is questionable at best[1], and even those that are "backed" are inescapably custodial with all that entails (lack of censorship resistance being one unavoidable property so long as coins retain any sign of fungibility). I hope they "concentrate on" Bitcoin - which under close examination seems the first time hard money has ever been created. 1. AAVE Risks per Asset https://docs.aave.com/risk/asset-risk/risks-per-asset https://docs.aave.com/risk/asset-risk/risks-per-asset
- chizhik-pyzhik 5y ago
  Stablecoins are indeed immature. But volatile assets don't make for good money. Have you heard of Gresham's Law? "Bad money drives out the good"- that is, people will hoard the lucrative asset (bitcoin) and actually use the boring one (stablecoins).
- 3np 5y ago

muhammadusman 5y ago

They should've stuck with Stellar, for any realistic money transferring between people (merchants, p2p, cross-border), Stellar is one of the best options as the fees are insanely low compared to any other large cryptocurrencies.

boramalper 5y ago
"The nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation was created in collaboration with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and the project officially launched that July. Stellar received $3 million in seed funding from Stripe.[6][7]"[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_(payment_network)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_(payment_network)#Hist... [0][6] http://fortune.com/2014/07/31/stripe-launches-bitcoin-challenger-gives-it-away-for-free/ http://fortune.com/2014/07/31/stripe-launches-bitcoin-challe... [0][7] http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-on-bitcoin-with-rival-digital-currency-stellar-1.1887360 http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/stripe-takes-o...

lmeyerov 5y ago

I've been seeing two sides of this: - Our own payments: Some remote contractors ask to be paid in crypto: haven't figured out clean way how wrt rest of our back-office SaaS stack, so not yet. To a much more negligible extent, our online customers want to pay that way: we do get a lot of proton etc. email users, so I can imagine more of this in the future, esp. as we add more privacy features. I bet other startups are seeing the same! - Our power users: Crypto product & investigation teams often want to embed/use our GPU graph viz tech, and our inquiries have grown up from early VC/ICO-dependent startups to ones with $B+ assets under management. At this rate, seems like only a matter of 1-2 years for banks and big consulting co's for the same thing. So a big yet modern payment processor like Stripe seems quite sensible right now! (And I think Square was trying on and off for awhile as well.)

NicoJuicy 5y ago

It's just FOMO, i think, since PayPal did something similar. No doubt they had an analysis about it. But the potential cost of being wrong is much bigger than financing 5 employees.

baby 5y ago
I don't think it is. It's just about accepting other means of payments, which is Stripe's business. I'm more interested in what a company like Wise would do with stablecoins.
- NicoJuicy 5y ago
  It's all about how many transactions there are. I don't think there are enough, just like in the past
  - baby 5y ago
    It’s up to stripe to decide if there is enough transaction now to make it worth it, or if they want to be one of the first to support the market.